Proposed as an object of study in the United States National Research Council report Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science (Jordan et al. 2001), the ‘critical zone’ refers to the area of the earth’s surface between the bottom of the groundwater and the top of the tree canopy. As geologists, soil scientists, hydrologists, ecologists, and others have developed an interdisciplinary critical zone science around the world, the critical zone concept has also been the basis for models of interdisciplinarity combining this with the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Bruno Latour’s ‘Gaia-politics’ has been a key influence in this emerging interdisciplinary field, recently engaged from the point of view of an ‘East Asian Critical Zone’ (Jobin and Chen 2023; see also Jobin 2018, 2020).

In dialogue with these contributions, this presentation will focus on the conduct of critical zone science in Europe and China. After situating the international emergence and development of the field, it will use case studies to compare scientific approaches in these two territories, with a focus on conceptual frameworks, place-based interventions, and systems of multi-scalar environmental governance. In doing so, the researcher will reflect on the future trajectories of critical zone science and situate these in relation to the models of interdisciplinarity envisioned.

Following its adoption by the US earth sciences community at the turn of the century, the concept of the ‘critical zone’ has been central to a so-called ‘terrestrial turn’ in the arts as well as the sciences. Originally defined as the “heterogeneous, near-surface environment in which complex interactions involving rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms regulate the natural habitat” (Jordan et al., 2001: 2), the concept has been engaged by thinkers across the environmental sciences and humanities to consider questions of ‘habitability’.

In this talk, David will reflect on this circulation as a contribution to the uptake and use of the critical zone concept in transdisciplinary enquiry. What does this circulation tell us about dialogues between the arts and the sciences? And how can transdisciplinary enquiry engaging the concept of the critical zone be reflexive about the power relations underlying how the earth’s surface has been mapped, explored, and exploited?

The talk will address ways in which the concept has been differently defined, framed, and situated around the world, reflecting on the history of ‘critical zone observatories’ in the US, Europe, and China, and the concept’s uptake in the arts and humanities inspired by the work of Bruno Latour.

‘Critical zone science’ – developed in different ways in different locations since it featured so centrally in the US National Science Foundation’s report on Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science (Jordan et al., 2001) – has been favoured by scientists and scientific funding agencies for its presumed capacity to integrate above- and below-ground ecologies, disciplines, and practices (see e.g. Richter et al., 2018). Conceived by early proponents as a weathering system science (Anderson et al., 2004), its epistemic precursors have been variously traced to Hutton, Humboldt, Vernadsky, and Tansley, prompting Simon Schaffer to reflect on its precedent in the promulgation of an observatory-based ‘geophysiology’ linked to colonial and capitalist extraction (2020). More recently, the practice of critical zone science has been characterised as a ‘Gaia-graphy’ (Arènes et al., 2018), entailing a shift in attention from places situated on surficial space to events situated in dynamic biogeochemical cycles, binding researcher and researched in a ‘Gaia 2.0’ of heightened human self-awareness (Lenton and Latour, 2018).

This paper reflects on the political entanglements of the volumetric practices undertaken by critical zone scientists in mainland China under the auspices of the UK-China Critical Zone Observatory, which between 2016 and 2020 funded four observatories in Guizhou, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, and Ningxia/Shaanxi provinces, in regions often targeted by huge land abandonment and population resettlement campaigns. Thus, the paper asks: how were volumetric practices entangled, or not, with the infrastructures of surficial monitoring and modelling that have supported such land abandonment and population resettlement campaigns, and with what effects?

‘Critical zone science’ – developed in different ways in different locations since it featured so centrally in the US National Science Foundation’s report on Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science (Jordan et al., 2001) – has been favoured by scientists and scientific funding agencies for its presumed capacity to integrate above- and below-ground environments. Conceived by early proponents as a weathering system science (Anderson et al., 2004), its epistemic precursors have been variously traced to Hutton, Humboldt, Vernadsky, and Tansley, prompting Simon Schaffer to reflect on its precedent in the promulgation of an observatory-based ‘geophysiology’ linked to colonial and capitalist extraction (2020). More recently, the practice of critical zone science has been characterised as a ‘Gaia-graphy’ (Arènes et al., 2018), entailing a shift in attention from places situated on surficial space to events situated in dynamic biogeochemical cycles.

This paper reflects on the practices of critical zone science in mainland China under the auspices of the UK-China Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) between 2016 and 2020. Such practices largely unfolded in regions targeted by huge land abandonment and population resettlement campaigns, entangling practices of subsurface enquiry with huge infrastructures of surficial monitoring and modelling that establish land to be abandoned, populations to be resettled, and practices to be discouraged. With a focus on the CZO in Guizhou, the paper investigates this entanglement, highlighting the ways in which practices of subsurface enquiry were similarly entangled with narratives of state-led development, tech-industry greenwashing, indigenous ecological knowledge, neo-Malthusian population policies, and Maoist agricultural science.

Since the first funding programme was launched in the US in 2006, the European Union, France, Germany, China, and other countries have developed networks of ‘Critical Zone Observatories’ (CZOs). The UK-China Critical Zone Observatory (CZO), the focus of this paper, was established in 2016 with joint funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the UK’s Newton Fund. Titled “Using Critical Zone Science to understand sustaining the ecosystem service of soil and water”, the programme funded five research projects between 2016 and 2020 led by paired UK and China teams at four CZOs around China.

Defined by the US National Science Foundation as the “heterogeneous, near-surface environment in which complex interactions involving rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life-sustaining resources” (Jordan et al., 2001: 2), the notion of the ‘critical zone’ has been translated and given agency in different ways by different interlocutors as it has emerged as a device in different modes of scientific and artistic enquiry in different locations and languages around the world, as evidenced in the recent volume Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (Latour and Weibel, 2020).

Informed by interviews conducted with UK and China-based scientists participating in the UK-China CZO, and with a focus on the practice of critical zone science in karst landscapes in Guizhou, this paper offers a series of reflections on what is at stake in these translations. Specifically, influenced by Elisabeth Povinelli’s work on transfiguration (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 2003; Povinelli, 2001, 2002, 2021) and geontopower (Povinelli, 2016), it seeks to reflect historically on framings of the critical zone, and interrogate the ways in which the concept of the critical zone functions in relation to political power, placing these in dialogue with the various ideas that have emerged concerning the capacities of the concept. In doing so, the paper seeks to contribute to debate on the ‘Geo’ in ‘Geopolitics’.

This paper reports and reflects on research undertaken for the ‘Integrated European Long-Term Ecosystem, Critical Zone, and Socio-Ecological Research Infrastructure’ (eLTER-RI). Informed by interactional science and technology studies (Jasanoff, 2004), this research sought to describe and compare approaches to knowledge in the critical zone, long-term ecological research and long-term socioecological research communities involved in eLTER-RI, to support a reflexive approach to a project that aims to develop eLTER-RI’s relations with scientific user communities. In connection with the theme, the paper seeks to explore the ecologies informing processes of translation in the different research communities and in eLTER-RI, and to be reflexive concerning the authors own exercise in translation.

Shimohua 石漠化 (rocky desertification), a term circulating in Chinese since at least 1981, has emerged as central to future-making practices in areas of China’s southwest with disproportionately rural, poor, ethnic minority populations. The phenomenon to which the term refers, a form of soil erosion in karst landscapes, has been used to justify land abandonment, population resettlement and commercial collectivisation efforts as part of nationally co-ordinated campaigns in provinces including Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi, Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan and Guangdong. The most recent national policy statement refers to rocky desertification as “the source for disasters, reason for poverty and root cause of backwardness in the southwest karst region” (NDRC, 2016, p. 3). I use textual analysis of 50+ natural science, social science, humanities and policy sources on rocky desertification published since 1981 to identify environmental futures envisioned in response to the problematic of rocky desertification; the spaces and places in and from which they emerged and were disseminated; the methods with which they were constructed and circulated; and the ways in which they situate populations in affected areas.

In doing so, I respond to the following questions. First, if ‘uncertainty’ and ‘indeterminacy’ have emerged as central to attempts to manage threats to liberal-democratic forms of life (Anderson, 2010), what has been central to the attempt to manage rocky desertification in China? Second, engaging with Elisabeth Povinelli’s concept of ‘geontopower’ (2016), how can historical geography contribute to what Povinelli calls an ‘anthropology of the otherwise’ in a post-socialist, semi-colonial context with approaches to the environment that are entangled with but distinct from the nature-culture dichotomy maintained in the Western academy (Hui, 2016; on the ‘Western academy’ see Braun, 2004, p. 171), and practices of land tenure, land enclosure and forced migration that destabilise people-place relations (Li, 2010)?

The PRC has identified the phenomenon of ‘rocky desertification’ (shimohua 石漠化) in 107,000 km² (1.1%) of national territory (State Forestry and Grassland Administration, 2018). This is lower than equivalent figures for ‘desertification’ (huangmohua 荒漠化) and ‘sandification’ (shahua 沙化) – 2.61mn km² (27.2%) and 1.72mn km² (17.9%) respectively (State Forestry Administration, 2015). The impact on governance, however, is highly significant. The phenomenon is a justification for land abandonment and resettlement in areas with disproportionately rural, poor, ethnic minority populations in provinces including Guizhou, Yunnan, and Guangxi. Despite much critical analysis of ‘desertification’ in the PRC in scholarship (Williams, 1997, 2000, 2002; Yeh, 2009; Kolås, 2014), however, there is no equivalent analysis of how ‘rocky desertification’ frames people and place. Using textual analysis of 30+ scientific and policy sources published between 2001 and 2018, therefore, drawing comparisons with scholarship on desertification, I detail: 1) the way ‘rocky desertification’ has been framed in the PRC, with a focus on definitions, causes, and methods, and 2) the science-policy interface that results, with a focus on policy development, implementation, and impact.